Exploitation and political cynicism
Bush unveils “bracero” program for immigrant workers

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/jan2004/immi-j09.shtml

By Bill Vann
9 January 2004

In a gesture steeped in political cynicism, President Bush Wednesday
advanced a vague proposal for granting a limited and temporary legal
status to as many as 12 million undocumented immigrants in the US. Bush
touted the plan as a more “humane” approach than the current system, but
the US president’s proposal is heavily weighted in the interests of the
corporations and employers. If implemented, it would create a legal
framework for maintaining a tier of second-class and super-exploited labor
in America.

Speaking at the White House, Bush mouthed rhetoric about the “American
dream” and bringing “abused and exploited” workers out of “the shadows.”
Immigrant advocates, however, denounced the plan as a system of indentured
servitude that could pave the way for intensified repression and mass
deportations.

Excluded from the plan is any new mechanism for undocumented workers
currently in the US to secure permanent-resident status and citizenship.
Bush explicitly declared himself in opposition to any “amnesty, placing
undocumented workers on the automatic path to citizenship.”

Instead, the plan would create a new category of “temporary workers” with
limited rights and dependent upon the mercy of their employers and the
government.

The announcement was widely seen as a cheap election-year ploy, aimed at
winning support from the country’s Hispanic population, which Republican
strategists increasingly see as key in a number of states—including
California, Texas and Florida. The proposal was extremely short on details
and made no reference to other existing pieces of draft immigration
legislation already before Congress.

Under the scheme put forward by Bush, both undocumented immigrants already
in the US and workers seeking to enter the US from abroad would be
permitted to apply for temporary worker status, allowing them to remain in
the country for up to three years with the possibility of at least one
extension, so long as they are employed.

Undocumented workers residing in the US would have to prove that they are
working, pass a security check and pay a fee. Those applying from abroad
would be eligible only to the extent that they were hired for jobs that
the government would somehow determine were not wanted by American
workers. These jobs would be listed by the US Labor Department and filled
with the aid of labor contractors.

Claims by the administration and sections of the media that the proposal
is a means of protecting immigrant workers against abuse are largely
specious. It would in fact grant no new rights in the workplace. Current
law already supposedly grants undocumented immigrants the rights to the
minimum wage, workers’ compensation, health and safety standards, overtime
and unionization.

There is no reason to believe that employers would face any more rigorous
enforcement of these regulations after the program was implemented than
they do now. In fact, the plan would make these workers even more
dependent upon their employers, who would in effect sponsor them.

“We’re going to be creating, under this type of legislation, a large
number of basically indentured servants,” Susan F. Martin, a Georgetown
University immigration expert who headed the US Commission on Immigration
Reform in the 1990s, told the Washington Post. Bush’s plan, she added,
is “as troubling an immigration proposal as I’ve seen in the past 25
years.”

Raul Yzaguirre, president of the National Council of La Raza, an Hispanic
immigrant rights group, called Bush’s proposal “a warmed over version of
the Bracero Program,” a scheme initiated during World War II, which
brought millions of Mexican farm laborers into the US on temporary
contracts to be brutally exploited in the fields. The Bush plan, he
added, “appears to offer the business community full access to the
immigrant workers it needs, while providing very little to the workers
themselves.”

After the three-year temporary status and whatever extension is granted
expire, workers would be subject to deportation. While they could apply
for green cards, the wait for such documents is interminable—8 to 15 years
for most Mexicans.

While Bush claimed his administration would increase the number of green
cards—which grant non-citizens a permanent right to live and work in the
US—issued each year, he gave no indication by what amount.

Currently, the US government maintains a ceiling of 140,000 on the number
of new green cards issued annually. There are up to 100 times as many
undocumented immigrants already in the US, and millions more are seeking
to apply from overseas. In the latest green card lottery that ended last
week, some 10 million people applied for 110,000 slots.

Given that being deported after a number of years is the ultimate result
of the proposed program, it is highly questionable whether large numbers
of undocumented immigrants would come forward to participate in any case.
They would also have to submit to interrogations and biometric imaging.

The most enthusiastic support for the proposed plan came from big business
groups, which welcomed it as a means of regularizing and legalizing the
ongoing super-exploitation of immigrant labor. To the extent that the
proposal implies an “amnesty” it is for employers like Wal-Mart, which saw
raids and arrests last year of some 245 allegedly undocumented workers who
were employed cleaning its stores. The main effect would be to legalize
the exploitation of cheap immigrant labor.

“The economy can’t expand unless we have workers to fill available jobs,”
said Randy Johnson, vice president of the US Chamber of Commerce. “Today’s
announcement provides a good opportunity to move forward and enact
sensible and comprehensive immigration reform.”

Some sections of Bush’s own Republican Party opposed the scheme as
insufficiently draconian in its treatment of the undocumented. House
Majority Leader Tom DeLay (Republican-Texas), for example,
voiced “reservations about allowing illegal immigrants into a US guest-
worker program that seems to reward illegal behavior.”

Rep. Elton Gallegly, a Republican from California and a member of the
committee that drafts immigration bills, said that Bush’s
proposal “amounts to the forgiveness of a criminal act, no different under
the law than printing hundred-dollar bills in your garage.”

Other members of the Republican Congressional majority indicated that the
proposal would be given little priority and was unlikely to be enacted in
any form in the foreseeable future. Indeed, Congress only recently let a
much more narrowly focused immigration reform bill—covering only
agricultural worker—die in committee.

There is little if any likelihood that Bush will expend any political
capital to see that his proposal does not suffer the same fate. While
posturing as a friend of the immigrant to curry favor with the Hispanic
electorate, he will be working at the same time to mobilize his ultra-
right-wing base, which is characterized by fanatical hostility to foreign-
born workers.

The announcement was timed just days before Bush is to attend a
hemispheric summit in Monterrey, Mexico. The Mexican government of
President Vicente Fox has voiced sharp criticism over the Bush
administration’s neglect of the immigration issue in the wake of the
September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the turn toward war abroad and
police-state crackdowns against immigrants at home.

While Bush began his presidency with bilateral talks with Fox on proposals
to regularize the status of Mexican immigrants—who account for as much as
70 percent of the undocumented in the US—these negotiations were abruptly
terminated. The US president made it clear Wednesday that his was a
unilateral proposal, not one negotiated with Mexico.

While there was little sign of popular enthusiasm for Bush’s proposal in
Mexico or among Mexican immigrants in the US, the Fox government treated
it as a positive development. This, despite the fact that the main issue
it had pressed in its talks with Washington in the spring and summer of
2001—creating a mechanism for undocumented workers to earn permanent
resident status—was excluded from the Bush plan.

For the Mexican ruling elite, the key question is not the democratic
rights of impoverished immigrant workers north of the border, but rather
the steady flow of remittances that these workers send back to Mexico,
which now constitute the country’s second-largest source of foreign
income. The temporary worker scheme is seen by the Fox government as a
means of securing this source of revenue.

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